the militant Sikhs of northern India and the
peoples of Kashmir. In 1947 the main enemy of
the Sikhs was the Muslims, from whom they
derive some of their religious practices. But since
independence the 7.5 million Sikhs have asserted
rights of independence from India’s Hindus as
well. The home of the Sikhs is the Punjab in
northern India, while the majority of Muslims live
in north-western India and in the east. They are
divided by the large central Indian land mass,
which is predominantly Hindu. But minority
communities of Hindus and Muslims are to be
found throughout India and Pakistan. Bengal in
the east had mixed Muslim and Hindu commu-
nities; the Punjab in the north is also mixed reli-
giously between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.
Some twenty major languages divide India, as
well as the 3,000 castes and sub-castes of
Hinduism; the landlord is divided from the
peasant; the wealthy merchant and factory owner
from the worker, and the bureaucracy and gov-
ernment have their own grades of influence. The
hundreds of princes great and small contributed
further to this fragmentation. It was Britain’s
imperial power that provided whatever unity
India enjoyed before independence.
Racial prejudice marred British India before
independence as it marred South Africa. It was
condemned by the more enlightened Englishmen,
among whom was Lord Salisbury, prime minister
in 1900. Replying to the governor of Bombay, he
wrote:
it interests me to find that you are struck with
the damned nigger element in the British
society at Bombay. It is bad enough in official
and military circles here. I look upon it as not
only offensive and unworthy but as represent-
ing what is now and will be... a serious polit-
ical danger!
A generation later, Nehru in his Discovery of
India, which he wrote in 1943, expressed his own
anger at the racial discrimination of notices placed
in railway carriages, on the walls of waiting rooms
and even attached to park benches, with the
insulting message ‘For Europeans only’. Nehru
comments:
the idea of a master race is inherent in imper-
ialism. There was no subterfuge about it; it
was proclaimed in unambiguous language by
those in authority.... generation after gener-
ation, and year after year, India as a nation and
Indians as individuals were subjected to insult,
humiliation, and contemptuous treatment....
The memory of it hurts, and what hurts still
more is the fact that we submitted for so long
to this degradation.
Where did the balance lie between the harm
done and the benefits brought by imperial rule?
Economic arguments are finely balanced and what
might have developed without British rule
becomes a hypothetical judgement. Among the
benefits can be enumerated the creation of a com-
mon language of government throughout India,
the establishment of law and order, the building of
a railway network spanning the continent, the
beginnings of industry and its protection after the
First World War, the development of higher edu-
cation, the training of a civil service and an army,
vast irrigation schemes, the better control of
famines when the vagaries of the weather deci-
mated agricultural production except on occasions
like 1943, better health care and control of the
killer diseases. But India was not a blank sheet that
Britain ‘modernised’. British rule was imposed on
an ancient civilisation whose intellectual elite had
produced philosophers, poets, historians, writers,
artists and scientists of world renown, men such as
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), poet, philo-
sopher and early advocate of international under-
standing based on respect and knowledge of the
different cultures of the world, and the physicist
C. V. Raman, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930.
One failure of British rule, by way of contrast, was
the illiteracy of the masses.
That the resentment of British imperialism and
the manipulation of India’s economic develop-
ment to suit British interests should create a
nationalist reaction was inevitable given the
growth of an Indian elite and middle class in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless,
the British did not attempt to crush independent
Indian political activities.
With all their arrogance and prejudice there was
also a genuine desire for reform, for involving
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